---
title: "Production-grade"
description: "Designed for secure, scalable, production-grade deployments"
---

## Overview

The Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) is designed with production-grade environments in mind, prioritizing **security**, **scalability**, and **observability** to ensure reliable performance at scale. It leverages the simplicity and robustness of **HTTP standards** for seamless integration with your existing tools and infrastructure.

## Core values

### Security

ACP aligns with modern security practices through familiar, HTTP-native mechanisms:

- **Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption** for secure, end-to-end communication
- **Support for common authentication methods** such as Basic Auth, Bearer tokens, and JWTs
- **Reverse proxy integration** to enforce access controls and security policies

### Scalability

ACP is a **stateless protocol** by design, just like HTTP. It supports session management, enabling developers to easily implement stateful agents when required.

This flexibility ensures ACP is highly scalable and reliable in high-demand environments:

- Deploy behind **standard HTTP load balancers**; route requests for stateful agents based on session
- Fully compatible with **Kubernetes** and other orchestration platforms
- Seamlessly integrates with **cloud-native infrastructure**

### Observability

Built around the HTTP request-response model, ACP is inherently easy to monitor using any standard HTTP monitoring tools, allowing you to:

- Track system health with **standard metrics**
- Monitor **performance** across agent interactions
- Quickly **diagnose** issues at scale
- Implement **detailed audit logging**

As an HTTP-based protocol, ACP integrates with existing [OpenTelemetry](https://opentelemetry.io/docs/what-is-opentelemetry) instrumentation, enabling request/response tracing and context propagation across networks. This makes it easy to monitor agent workflows across distributed systems.

<Tip>Dive deeper into tracing and diagnostics with the [ACP Debug Guide](/how-to/debug) — your go-to resource for setting up instrumentation and making the most of your telemetry data.</Tip>

The ACP SDK enhances observability with improved traces and default exporters for all telemetry signals, ensuring seamless integration with OpenTelemetry-driven standards such as [OpenInference](https://github.com/Arize-ai/openinference) and [OpenLLMetry](https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry).

### Identity Federation

ACP is developing support for **User and Client Identity Federation** to enable smooth integration with your existing identity management infrastructure. This feature will allow agents to:

- Authenticate users across **multiple identity providers**
- Maintain **consistent authorization** between systems
- Simplify **organization-wide access control**
- Enhance **security management**

This functionality is under active development. We welcome your input to help shape the future of identity federation in ACP.

Visit our [Contribute](/about/contribute) page to join the discussion.

## Agents Deployment

### Standalone ASGI Application

For integration with external ASGI servers, the SDK offers application factory functions. This approach separates the agent definition from the server implementation, providing more flexibility for production deployments:

```python standalone.py
from collections.abc import AsyncGenerator

from acp_sdk.models import (
    Message,
)
from acp_sdk.server import RunYield, RunYieldResume, agent, create_app

# This example demonstrates how to serve agents with you own server


@agent()
async def echo(input: list[Message]) -> AsyncGenerator[RunYield, RunYieldResume]:
    """Echoes everything"""
    for message in input:
        yield message


app = create_app(echo)

# The app can now be used with any ASGI server

# Run with
#   1. fastapi run examples/servers/standalone.py
#   2. uvicorn examples.servers.standalone:app
#   ...
# Source: python/examples/servers/standalone.py
```